I’m looking for a Mac app that will let me create simple “Booklets/Brochures” by which I mean a 4/8/12/etc page document which, when printed in “landscape” mode on US Letter paper (or US Legal, if you want to get fancy), will be able to be folded in half to create a… well… booklet.
I know it’s possible to do this by hand, but it’s tedious because you have to manually pair the pages like 8 and 1, 7 and 2, 6 and 3, 5 and 4 in a particular order.
That’s the part that I want the software to deal with. Ideally, I want to be able to work with the document as “normal” as possible in Pages or MSWord, and then have the software deal with formatting it properly for printing.
I only need to do this a few times a year, so I don’t want or need anything complicated like Adobe InDesign or something like that, but I’m not against paying for an app that will do this. Obviously, a free solution would be welcome, too.
Word should do this for you out of the box: open the print dialog, select the pane selector dropdown that usually defaults to Copies & Pages, choose Layout, and change Two-Sided to Booklet. If you do this with an 8-page doc and then Open in Preview, you should have four landscape pages: 8/1, 2/7, 6/3, 4/5.
It even handles the “some pages need to be upside down” issue too.
Pro Tip: Unless you’re young with perfect vision and so is your audience, don’t try to use 12-point fonts when doing this, because a full-page is getting resized down to 1/2 a page. I used 18-point and that seemed to be very readable.
Also, you get a lot of white-space at the top and bottom margin, even if you reduce the top/bottom margins to 0. I leave the left/right margins at 0.5". YMMV.
If you stumble upon an app that is not able to create booklets:
I have been using v1 (and still am using v1 because v2 meant to pay the full price again and I do not see the benefit for me [I do only need it occasionally.]). v1 still works just fine.
Back before the turn of the century Apple used to offer printed manuals for its products. That was where you could find all sorts of tidbits and see the true power of software. Sadly, today you have to accidentally stumble upon features like this.
